City wants ideas at Aragon town hall

Aragon city officials want to hear from local residents later this month during an upcoming weekend session at the Brenda Gazaway Municipal Complex.

The hopes according to Mayor Garry Baldwin is to provide the city with ideas for producing a plan forward as Aragon seeks to figure out a path forward as a new decade draws closer. The upcoming town hall will be held from 1 to 3 p.m. on Saturday, February 24.

“This isn’t going to be a gripe session,” Baldwin said. “We want the people to come to us with real ideas of what we want to do.”

He said he wanted to hear more specifics about what local residents want the city to look like in the decades to come, and hoped those with issues or complaints would bring them directly to city hall during business hours.

Baldwin, who has been in office since November 2016, said that many of the areas he’d hoped to make progress in. However one of his main goals to push forward recreation opportunities for local residents saw the increase of availability of some spaces, such as new picnic tables and benches at parks, infrastructure upgrades at Pittman Park, and more recently new basketball goals and half courts set up for use.

What Baldwin’s hope is to figure out the next steps for the city’s progress forward, and find in the process what ideas might turn into projects that could be used as part of a potential new countywide Special Purpose, Local Option Sales Tax extension.

Baldwin said the last package was developed during administrations that were estimating the costs of items like police cars or building upgrades based on prices before inflation caused them to go up, and by the time the purchases were made they ended up costing more than expected.

Added to that has been less than expected income generated by the one-cent sales tax draw on purchases made by people in the county on SPLOST based on projections made when the fund was drawn up to put before voters in 2014.

That hasn’t stopped the cities or county in making the purchases of police cars or completing project that were included on the list, but it has caused them to dip into general funds in some cases, or to rely on the monthly revenue generated by the SPLOST collections to pay back what they’ve already done.

A new SPLOST extension isn’t a done deal yet. County Manager Matt Denton said that a lot of moving parts have to be completed before anything is put before voters, and he added that a look at future projections for the fund are needed before the cities or county ask voters for any additional funds.

If a list is developed, Baldwin already has some ideas of what he’d like to include on the list, like a replacement trash truck that serves city residents as just one example. Before any list is put together, he hopes local residents will give him some input on how the money should be spent.

What Baldwin hopes to avoid above all is putting forth a list that will be impossible to complete, and cited an example from the past SPLOST list for Aragon where he said $50,000 was set aside to purchase and remove a blighted property, an item that isn’t enough money to fulfill.